Theresa Baus

Rhode Island may be the “red” state in terms of the state color, flower and tree, but it bleeds blue – Navy blue. That’s because the U.S. Navy is deeply anchored into the fabric of the Ocean State’s history and economy. Its roots stretch all the way back to the birth of an armed naval force in 1775, and to the arrival of the forerunner to today’s naval research center on Goat Island in 1869. The Naval Academy sat out the civil war in Newport, which is now home to a collection of Naval training facilities, including the Naval War College. Over the years, Quonset Point has hosted the Naval Air Station, the Seabees and the Navy’s Antarctic Support Squadron. On the financial side of the ledger, the Navy today is not only the third largest employer in the state; it is also the leading economic force for many businesses – big and small.
Particularly big is the Naval Undersea Warfare Center (NUWC), a roughly billion-dollars-a-year research center that serves as the nation’s repository for undersea warfare and technology knowledge. It is big, really big, and its tentacles are everywhere. “If Rhode Island has one drawing card in the business of undersea technology, it’s NUWC and everyone affiliated with it. The Rhode Island high-tech industry is NUWC actually, and the industry spinoffs,” says Malcolm Spaulding, co-founder of South Kingston, R.I. based ASA Sciences and Professor Emeritus of Ocean Engineering at the University of Rhode Island.
“Contractors locate in Southeastern Rhode Island because of the proximity to NUWC. And for the jobs - lots and lots of them,” continues Spaulding. “NUWC is the largest employer of graduates of URI’s marine sciences and engineering programs. If you look at NUWC staff, about a third came from URI,” he adds. “We probably hire more PhDs – 170 – than anyone else in the area; half our people have masters,” says Don Aker, Deputy Technical Director of NUWC, Division Newport.
Overall, NUWC employs 2,748 government civilian employees and 31 military members with a total gross payroll of more than $296 million. Of the full-time government civilian staff, 74% are scientists or engineers and approximately 36% have graduate degrees. Anywhere from one third to one in every five are said to be University of Rhode (URI) Island alumni, many of whom went through NUWC’s internship program, and later have the opportunity to return to URI under a special, multi-discipline master’s program offered to NUWC employees.
With everyone cozying up to NUWC, it might come as a surprise to find that facility is actively and aggressively seeking paying customers to buy its services, licenses and intellectual property. Especially when you look at the numbers.
NUWC impact in dollars and cents
The Navy’s substantial presence is divided primarily between Naval Station Newport, which houses most of the U.S. Navy’s training facilities, including the Naval War College among its 50 plus tenant commands, and NUWC Newport, the east coast underwater research and development arm of the NavSea. In addition to R&D, NUWC provides testing and evaluation, engineering, autonomous underwater systems, fleet support for submarine warfare systems and many other offensive and defensive weapons systems associated with the undersea realm. NUWC employs more than 4,400 civilian and military personnel worldwide, with budgets of over $1 billion. With that kind of presence comes a lot of economic power, and payout. In 2012, the total funded program of the Naval Undersea Warfare Center (NUWC) Newport topped $935 million. More than half of its total operating budget, $581 million, went to payroll, construction, facility support and local contracts. The command is the largest federal activity in R.I. in terms of personnel and payroll, with NUWC taking the biggest chunk of that. The center awarded approximately $421 million in contracts, of which $200 million went to Rhode Island. NUWC also provides a lot of funding from the Small Business Innovative Research (SBIR) grant program.
“It’s a big boost to the community, a lot of the sponsors of those grants were based here in Newport because there’s good contact with the engineering, customer and defense communities,” said Jim Dodez, Vice President of Marketing and Strategic Planning, KVH Industries, Inc. in Middletown, R.I. SBIR grants stems from the mandate that a certain percentage of all government research money has to be directed to small business. “So much money has been spent here.”
As has so much knowledge has been gained, and stored, and actually, declassified. And much if it is up for grabs. That’s because despite those impressive budget figures from last years, the truth is, NUWC is not funded like your average government or military agency, which means it has to operate like a business. And that means actively selling its services and access to its intellectual property.
“One of the things that make us different from other government entities is that we are a Naval working capital fund activity. Almost every other federal agency has a line item in the budget to do what they do. We don’t,” explains Dr. Theresa A. Baus, Head, Technology Partnerships Office, Naval Undersea Warfare Center (NUWC). As a result, NUWC needs customers and sponsors to bill or services. Most of its budget comes for doing work for other sectors of the Navy, but they still need dollars back as it were, from the private sector, about 3%. So much so that the facility is open to doing projects that fall outside their purview.
“My function is to facilitate agreement between the division and outside entities, and we do this in a variety of ways,’ said Baus.
Spaulding describes Baus as “essentially the technology transfer office of NUWC at the pointy end of trying to get industry to take advantage of what they’ve got to offer.”
Anything labeled a “warfare center’’ tends to give off a scent of secrecy. But Akers said people might be surprised. “We definitely have areas of the organization we let the outside world into. Much of our research involves things we can do in association with universities and individuals.”

Have it your way
The opportunities for contracting with the private sector come from many angles. In addition to licensing NUWC’s technology, the facility makes money by:
• Selling outright or leasing access to, the center’s enormous trove of technology, patents and other intellectual property. Patents can be licensed singularly or in bundles. “We are probably awarded about 50 patents a year out of the 73 or so applications we file,” said Baus. “We are usually first or second in the Navy in terms of who gets the most patent awards every year,” adds Akers.
• Renting out its unique testing facilities to customers in a wide range of industries. “We have a number of unusual test facilities that are important to have for us, but industry may not have enough usage for them to justify owning and operating one. As a government facility we can do that,” explains John Woodhouse, a NUWC spokesman. For example, NUWC has isolation room that allows researchers to measure sound. There is also a wind tunnel that can rack the effect of flow over a surface. Several years ago, Ford Motor Co. wanted to see how much noise was created by the side view mirrors on the Ford 150 truck. So they contracted with NUWC to bring in a truck and test the sound.
• Cooperative Agreements. This is where NUWC and a client sit down and work out the scope of the project, who does what, can use what, who pays for what, and at the end, how the technology rights will be handled. One thing potential clients should be aware of – NUWC can only grant non-exclusive usage rights to a technology under a cooperative agreement.
However, the client doesn’t have to pay any fees. The topic area of research has to be in NUWC’s mission area and the work has to be collaborative, and of mutual benefit to both parties.
• Joint research on areas the Navy is very interested in, such as battery technologies, corrosion, antifouling coatings, chemical sensor detection, buoys, autonomy in general. This is especially helpful in enabling the navy to avoid reinventing the wheel.
• Access to NUWC’s pool of government mandated Small Business Innovation Research fund. Akers says NUWC has about $200 million set aside for contracting with small businesses. “We use that to try and get a nice innovative company to give us new ideas.”
So it’s not just the university that is open for business. For startups, spinoffs and small businesses especially, examining NUWC’s services and portfolio may be well worth it. As many industry observers have noted, you can’t buy the kind of brain power and institutional knowledge roaming about NUWC’s laboratories, nor can most young companies afford to build any testing facility, never mind anything particularly unique. NUWC is willing to work with anyone willing to pay them or who can find a use for much of the technology they develop. And the list of people who are profiting from that agreement is getting longer by day.
“For a long time people have thought they couldn’t come in and talk to us. That was true 10 or 15 years ago. But things have changed,” says Aker.

navigation equipment
aboard ships. He will be responsible
for sales of Mackay's complete
product line throughout the Northeast
United States.
Theresa Schmidt was promoted
to coordinator of contracts
and licensing. She is responsible for
interfacing with customers on all
matters related to ship

—Literature Available
Theresa Dale has joined the
Magnavox Advanced Products Systems
Company of Torrance, Calif.,
as marketing services manager. She
assumes responsibility for all facets
of marketing communications planning,
budgeting and implementation,
including advertising, public
relations

included in the arrangement are
the 5,000-hp City of St. Louis, the 5,850-hp
Virginia E. Towey, the 7,000-hp James F.
Towey, and the 7,000-hp Theresa Seley.
Westinghouse Credit Corporation, a wholly
owned subsidiary of Westinghouse Electric
Corporation, is a $2-billion finance company
headquartered

hardware solutions within its 3D, MOTION and GEO range of products, Coda Octopus has built a reputation of delivering high quality solutions.
Email: theresa.esser@codaoctopus.com
www.codaoctopus.com
(As published in the July/August 2016 MTR100 edition of Marine Technology Reporter)

research vessel.
Labeled as "The region's most capable academic
research ship," and sponsored by the
Ocean Studies Foundation, the vessel Osprey,
ex-Theresa Ann, built in 1973 by San Diego
Marine Construction Company as an 1,100-toncapacity
tuna fishing vessel, will soon provide an
enormous potential

is larger than the largest SUVs.
The second stop was the High Temperature Superconductivity Lab, explained to each of the nine groups by Pete Ferrara, Theresa Vaites, Kevin Woods, Dan Santosusso and Navy Commander Jeff Nowlin.
Station two was to show how new superconductive cables would help transport

, digital messaging service
used for telex and data applications
such as e-mail, Global Positioning
and Global Maritime Distress and
Safety messages.
Theresa Edwards and Joe Wheelahan
at CMC' s Southbury earth station
immediately began determining
locations of ships near the Ocean
Wolf and requested

P. Curley Jr.
Ocean In? nity Buys
Edward P. Curley, Jr, 79, died on February 3, 2018 after a long illness.
9th HUGIN
Born in 1938 to Edward Sr. and Theresa (Savio) Curley, after graduating from
Ocean In? nity, the U.S. company
Yale in 1960, Ed worked at Clevite Transistor in what was the beginning of

products, Coda Octo-
operation is complete. pus has built a reputation of delivering
The Echoscope and sister products, high quality solutions.
Email: theresa.esser@codaoctopus.com
the C500 and Dimension, can be de-
www.codaoctopus.com
ployed on a subsea remotely operated
vehicle (ROV) or from a surface

there. From 1989, Len act-
ed as an independent consultant.
Remembrance: Steve D. Harris
EBDG announced that colleague Steve
Harris and his wife Theresa were among
those missing in the recent Oso mudslide
disaster.
Although, at press time, Steve and his
wife Theresa have yet to be found, the

included in the arrangement are
the 5,000-hp City of St. Louis, the 5,850-hp
Virginia E. Towey, the 7,000-hp James F.
Towey, and the 7,000-hp Theresa Seley.
Westinghouse Credit Corporation, a wholly
owned subsidiary of Westinghouse Electric
Corporation, is a $2-billion finance company
headquarter

navigation equipment
aboard ships. He will be responsible
for sales of Mackay's complete
product line throughout the North-
east United States.
Theresa Schmidt was pro-
moted to coordinator of contracts
and licensing. She is responsible for
interfacing with customers on all
matters related

messaging service
used for telex and data applications
such as e-mail, Global Positioning
and Global Maritime Distress and
Safety messages.
Theresa Edwards and Joe Wheela-
han at CMC' s Southbury earth sta-
tion immediately began determining
locations of ships near the Ocean
Wolf and requested

. During the next five years,
he worked his way up through the
hawse pipe from ordinary seaman
to third officer of the Grace Line
freighter Santa Theresa. He also
served in the Navy as a quarter-
master aboard submarines.
Mr. Connolly is a member of the
Financial Executives Institute, the
Downtown

Gulf of Mexico. The other elements of the total transportation service are two 26,-000-ton barges, Freeport 1 & 2, and two 5,000-hp tugs, Alison C. and Theresa F. They will be operated by Red Circle Transport Co., an affiliate of The Ohio River Com-pany. For the next 15 years, the barges and tugs are committed

is more than playing a game of Tetris.
Sometimes it's like playing chess with Bobby Fischer.
On the upper Mississippi at Lynwood, it was time for the Theresa Wood
to drop off two empty barges. To rearrange the tow, the deckhands pulled
apart and remade 22 lines; set the sounder and speakers at the head

Discovering Rhode Island Defense transfer ofÞ ce of NUWC at the pointy end of trying to get industry to take advantage of what theyÕve got to offer.Ó Anything labeled a Òwarfare centerÕÕ tends to give off a scent of secrecy. But Akers said people might be surprised. ÒWe deÞ nitely have areas of the

Choctaw County. Twenty-nine women from the 1966 graduating class of Ackerman High School in Ackerman, Miss., served as the ship?s sponsors. Lead sponsor, Theresa Gilliam Pitts, a retired teacher, broke the traditional bottle of champagne acrossthe bow to formally christen the ship while she and the other sponsors

sales@harcomanufacturing.com
ENGINE AND
ENVIRONMENTAL
PRODUCTS
ABS Certified Bureau V eritas Qualified
her second trip. “They put me on the Theresa Wood,” she
said. “Captain Rusty asked me to come on regular.”
“That’s really great news!” I told her, happy for both her
and the rest of the crew

relief work when he’s not at bike
rallies.
The Thomas E. Erickson eventually took me back to the
same stretch of the Mississippi where I’d boarded the
Theresa Wood, several days earlier. Captain Towns had
been told there would be 12 boats waiting to get through
the Melvin Price Locks ahead of us and we

quiet bunch, keeping to themselves,
she told me. But the regulars she had met when she first
came aboard were just as loud as the crew I’d met on the
Theresa Wood, “always laughing and carrying on and teas-
ing each other.”
I understood then why my first day on the Thomas E.
Erickson was nothing like

42 MN October 2010
I left the Theresa Wood and her tow at Lock 10 in
Gutenberg, Wis. on the upper Mississippi River. My AEP
River Operations contact, Sharon Tharp, who had picked
me up at the St. Louis airport and delivered me to the boat
five days earlier, was again waiting by the company SUV.
By

, including key people at AEP River Operations, Marquette
Transportation and the Waterways Council, Inc. I am especially grateful to the crew of the
Theresa Wood for teaching me so much about life on the river and always being ready to
explain the workings of the boat and its tow. In the pages of this